DVD Review: Children’s Hospital – Season 3

Part of the charm of Adult Swim micro-series Children’s Hospital is the sheer amount of weirdness and non sequitur Rob Corddry and company can pack into a mere 12 minutes or so. Still, throughout Season 3, one can’t help but think the show could probably succeed as a full half-hour comedy, offering even more opportunity for sitcom subversion and more fleshed-out stylistic digressions. Of course, there’s no need to mess with a good thing, and subsequent Adult Swim mini-shows like Eagleheart and NTSF:SD:SUV:: make it clear there’s plenty of life left in the genre.

Children’s Hospital is certainly a sharp parody of a wide host of medical dramas, from House to ER to General Hospital, but that’s hardly all it is. The show’s complete disregard for continuity of any kind allows it to easily set one episode in the 1970s or embrace a particularly Brechtian stage retelling of one of its stories or introduce a side character whose delusional fantasy world is responsible for a main character’s existence.

Abandoning good sense and keeping a giant reset button handy give Children’s Hospital an unparalleled opportunity to try out just about anything, and just about anything works here. How else were we going to get a Party Down reunion on our TVs again, if not for Children’s Hospital and its willingness to ignore the overlapping cast members?

The ensemble cast is just great, from Corddry’s laughter-wielding Blake Downs, who may or may not be an actual clown, to Megan Mullally’s gruff, crippled, sexually adventurous Chief, to Ken Marino’s smarmy, Jewish Dr. Glenn Richie. Lake Bell, Rob Huebel, Erinn Hayes, Malin Akerman and Henry Winkler round out the leads for Season 3, which also includes numerous uproarious guest appearances from the likes of Nick Offerman, Jon Hamm, Jordan Peele, Sarah Silverman, and David Wain.

The Season 3 DVD features a couple of extras, including a web promo series featuring Huebel explaining the inner workings of the human body, deleted scenes and a gag reel that also tends to focus on the many flubs by Huebel.